Jeanette Ehlers is a Danish-Trinidadian artist based in Copenhagen. Her interdisciplinary portfolio includes video installations, films and performances, in which she questions the legacies of slavery in white-dominant societies, and the continuing re-enactments of colonial violence in the present. As a mixed-race female artist with African-Caribbean ancestry, Ehlers’s artistic language aims at acting out the encrypted memory of her black heritage in formats that make it decipherable and meaningful in the present. Denmark, where Ehlers was educated from a young age, had Caribbean colonies. Her Trinidadian father played an important role in the shaping of her Caribbean identity to the point that he has been the protagonist of some of her video installations. Ehlers uses her Caribbean-Atlantic history as the trigger for most of her artworks, such as the video Black Bullets, winner of the main prize at the Caribbean Festival of the Image in 2015 held at the Mémorial Acte museum in Guadeloupe.
Conceptual art for Ehlers is restorative in the sense that it gathers together the painful experiences of a traumatic past she has never fully known but which she has lived, as those experiences have been passed on to her by previous generations. The effects of this are amplified, given that slavery’s imprint of racism is to be felt in the present day. But while recovering something of the emotion that was present in the initial trauma of slavery, Ehlers’ performances trigger multidirectional networks of meaning so powerful that they debunk any temptation to turn the trauma into an identity fetish. She explores the body as a powerful agent of post-memory, defined by Marianne Hirsch (1996, p. 659) as a form of memory that connects to its object ‘not through recollection but through an imaginative investment and creation’.
The performance Whip It Good: Spinning from History’s Filthy Mind revolves around a white canvas, in front of which Ehlers, dressed in white and wearing white make-up on her face and on her bare arms and legs, holds a whip, which she rubs in charcoal and relentlessly whips the canvas with (see fig. 5.2). She eventually passes the whip to the audience for them to finish the work on the canvas.5 Whip It Good was first commissioned in 2013 by the Art Labour Archive in Berlin, and eventually toured in Florida (2014) and in London, at the Royal Academy of Arts and at Autograph (2015). Each time, the reaction of the audience, when asked to whip the canvas, was key to the performance, precisely because it interactively engaged with the act of whipping as a complex
5 http://www.jeannetteehlers.dk/m4v/video21.htm (accessed 15 March 2019).
and brutal act carrying multiple layers of traumatic referencing. Ehlers herself was struck by the fact that that not only the willingness of the spectators to take the whip, but also the whipping gesture of those who accepted the invitation, varied considerably depending on whether they were a woman, a man, a white or a black person.
Leaving aside the fact that whipping is something that just a few people have personally experienced in contemporary times, and which requires some physical ability not all may have, the fact that some spectators refused to engage fully with a brutal gesture associated with domination and humiliation, while others were ready to do so, reveals that one’s body acts out traumatic gestures differently, not only according to one’s personal story, but also to which story one wants to tell about oneself publicly. Ehlers herself acknowledges that she has a complex relationship with the whip, not because she has experienced being whipped or has ever whipped anybody, but because her ancestors from her father’s side were enslaved Africans in Trinidad and Tobago. While performing the unspoken, her body mobilises a sensorial language, which creates the conditions for a reconciliatory debate to happen between different, latent, but always embodied, perspectives on violence and domination, blurring the limits between collective and individual memory. Ehlers’ performance plays on the degree to which bystanders, all with their own personal and intimate Figure 5.2. Whip It Good was first commissioned by Art Labour Archives and Ballhaus Naunynstrasse, Berlin, 2013. (Photo, by permission: Nicolaj Recke, Brundyn Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa, 2015.)
stories, are comfortable participating in such an event, and hence she redefines accountability as a site of empowerment and liberation.
Whip It Good explores the relationship between agency and re-enactment, and particularly the extent to which memory works as an inherited archive unconsciously stored in the body and retrieved by the kinetic return to gestures of the past. While the whip works as a metonymy of slavery, the act of whipping lends itself to multiple interpretations that powerfully combine empowerment with re-enactment.
The first knot of meaning triggered by Ehlers’ performance resides in the act of whipping as a re-enacted gesture, which empowers the black woman to strike back. The act of white men whipping enslaved women belongs to the historical vignettes one has in mind when thinking about the history of slavery from a gender perspective. So much so that this image can be defined as a primal scene of slavery in the collective imagination: one among many punishing methods, connoting phallic domination, that allowed overseers and masters to control the female bodies over which they ruled, or which they owned, in the psychopathological and delusional system of slavery.
In this vein, Whip It Good positions itself in a dialogue with the works of other black feminist artists who symbolically reverse the dynamics of power in their artworks by handing the whip to the enslaved woman, as in Kara Walker’s 2012 Palmetto Libretto; Sketch for an American Comic Opera with Fort Sumter.
In this four-panel pastel and graphite drawing series, Walker reimagined the key episode that was the catalyst for the American civil war – the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter, South Carolina. Walker’s drawings turn the history of slavery in the United States of America into four ironic, brutal and powerful vignettes, which portray slavery and racism as the original sins of the American nation. The scene happens on the edge of Charleston bay, with Fort Sumter in flames in the background. The drawings at each end of the frame work as symmetrically inverted vignettes, and metaphors of the north and south: while the drawing on the far left represents a naked black enslaved woman standing up and whipping a naked white man lying on the floor with his hands tied.
Meanwhile, the drawing on the far right represents a white man, dressed in white, whipping a naked black woman. While the woman’s nudity points at her ongoing commodification by male- and white-dominant American society, and signals rape as the usual practice of control, agency is rendered more complex as the black woman powerfully holding the whip converses visually with a third female character in the middle image. This occupies two panels: a white woman in the water, trying to save a naked black man from drowning;
she holds him firmly with one arm while waving a piece of white cloth with the other hand, as a sign of surrender and help-seeking. The white flag in the air recalls the two whips brandished by the other figures, male and female, at each end of the artwork. Walker pairs black and white, female and male, naked and clothed, in a visual charade that re-enacts a historical episode so as to
turn it into an enigmatic and ironic mythology of violence, targeting the very foundation of American civil rights.
Walker’s and Ehlers’ works are encoded in black and white and they seem to be in dialogue as they reverse the codes of white/male supremacy to empower the woman to claim back her agency. By doing so, they turn whipping into a metonymy and slavery into a foundational trauma continuing into the present.
The title Whip It Good suggests that anger can lead to relief, recalling Audre Lorde’s view in Sister Outsider that anger is useful for developing knowledge and should be deployed creatively (Lorde, 1984). Ehlers’ position in the debate of black liberation is that art can be assigned a cathartic and imaginative task, that of re-making memory so as to invent new possibilities for her contemporaries as they participate in a debate about justice and freedom. While the genesis of this discussion is to be found in the past, its actual meaning happens in the present, confirmed by the participatory and ephemeral dimension of the performance.
In Whip It Good, the whip is turned into a paint-brush in a non-neutral space, the art gallery. The Berlin production took place in a classical art setting, and Ehlers was surrounded by white marble Apollos and Venuses while whipping her canvas. This leads to the second knot of meaning in her Whip It Good.
While the performance is to a certain extent the re-enactment of a collective and historical initial trauma, it is at the same time a metaphoric displacement of the history of slavery in the realm of art, questioning the meaning of artistic agency, from a black female perspective, while the art world is ruled by European and masculinist canons. The value of art – what makes it ‘good’
– is also addressed, as the title suggests that the canvas should be whipped with a proper skill and natural ability. This opens the way for multiple stories of empowerment. The whip becomes the key for performing agency, with whichever meaning the person controlling the whip wants to give it. Ehlers’ re-enactment triggers resistance and liberation as much as execution and control, eventually inviting anyone to ‘feel good after whipping it’, whatever ‘it’ might mean for each individual. As they leave their trace on the canvas, lash after lash, the emotions that inhabit the whipping agent acquire value. Art-making becomes a force for tackling preconceived standards of beauty, whether they conform to the blueprint set by the European canon dating back to times of slavery (ideological value), or they are designated by the market economy that decides arbitrarily what each artwork is worth and the price that should be paid to own it (financial value). Ehlers’ approach resonates with André Lepecki’s (2016, p. 21) definition of re-enactment as ‘a will to perform chronopolitical acts informed by an ethics of returning, by a dance of reflection, by affective transmission, all essential in resisting the neoliberal impetus to never look back’.
The creative force of Whip It Good is cathartic and participatory. It bets that looking back in anger might be the best way to draw out the ghosts and become an agent of one’s life. The final canvas is the result of collective whippings and it
encapsulates the memory of each performance. Each canvas looks different as it records the many different ways in which the participants used the whip, with different strength, style and frequency. The quantity of charcoal on the whip, the strength and swiftness of the lashes, the intervals of time between each lash are empirical elements which have an impact on the way the canvas looks at the end, to the point of sometimes being completely torn apart. Whip It Good performs the story of the artwork in the making. It ultimately talks about art, and of its role, power and function in the public space. Ehlers’ conceptual art speaks the language of collective accountability, arguing for freedom and liberation through gestures that might not seem easy to perform, as they offer the possibility of acting out hidden affects that are unformed, or still to be defined.
It demonstrates that the collective dialogue around past traumas that continue to haunt the present, like the unsolved traumas of slavery fuelling racism and racial discrimination in the present, can only happen at the level of creative interpretation, which avoids the trap of reproducing the past and repeating the trauma. Ehlers’s metonymic re-enactment echoes Robert Blackson’s (2007, p.
30) view that, ‘drawing personal motivation from either your past or historical references is the conventional element necessary to construct a re-enactment.
The degree to which performers empower themselves through layers of authenticity is secondary to their willingness to allow personal interpretation rather than verisimilitude to influence their actions’.
The subtitle ‘Spinning from History’s Filthy Mind’, borrowed from Krista Franklin’s poem ‘Black Bullets’, questions the extent to which we are ready to face and do something in the present with the haunting pains of our past. The canvas stands for a totalising metaphor that encompasses the many painful pasts which each and every one of us unconsciously carries with us in life, in spite of ourselves. Ehlers brings what Christopher Bollas (1987) defined as unthought knowledge to the realm of participatory art; by the same token, she creates an empowering mode of emotional exchange, beyond the rationality of language, between those who have been ‘shaped by traumatic events that can be neither fully understood nor re-created’ (Hirsh, 1996, p. 569).